Video 7:07
Binge culture

Transcript

QUENTIN DEMPSTER, PRESENTER: Alcohol-fuelled violence through a contemporary Australian youth culture which not only condones but celebrates binge drinking has provoked health and police authorities to declare we've got a problem. What's known as Schoolies Week perhaps best symbolises the formal start of this culture, although many young people begin drinking from the age of 12. At a recent Institute of Public Administration forum, experts in the field were asked for their perspectives on youth, alcohol and violence. The contributions were confronting.

ANDREW SCIPIONE, COMMISSIONER OF POLICE: We do have a problem with alcohol in Australia. There can be no denying that. When you see what police see. When you see drunken groups of teenagers wanting to take on the most powerful riot squad that there is in this country, you know you've got a problem that's probably out of control.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: All the police commissioners of Australia including Andrew Scipione from NSW want policymakers, legislators and the community to get a handle on what's really happening when you mix alcohol with the deft defiance of modern youth. An Institute of Public Administration critical issues forum in December set out to define the problem and share ideas to better manage the risks to life and health.

ANDREW SCIPIONE: When you look at the amount of alcohol abuse that's related to things like sexual assault, murder, domestic assault, road deaths, pedestrian deaths. When you look at just the general levels of malicious damage and anti-social behaviour - we've got a problem.

GORDIAN FULDE, ST VINCENTS EMERGENCY: On, typically a Friday or Saturday night, it's nearly like a war zone. You have got people who are bleeding, people who are vomiting, males and unfortunately females, and there's usually one or two hanger-oners who are also pissed and being obnoxious. So it's organised chaos and it really is an ugly, unpleasant scene.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Dr Don Weatherburn, director of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, has been pushing containment strategy for alcohol-related violence which police have been pursuing through prosecutions for the irresponsible service of alcohol.

DON WEATHERBURN, STATISTICIAN: Seven pubs alone in Sydney accounted for a quarter of all the assaults on licenced premises. So for my money if we want to get the assault rate down, and there's every sign now that we might be able to do this this time - I say "this time" meaning this year or the year coming - then we've gotta focus our attention on licensed premises, the small minority of licenced premises that don't serve alcohol responsibly.

GORDIAN FULDE: I would love people to see what they really look like. I'd love people to see how they behave. In other words, everybody's got a mobile phone, everybody can now take pictures and things like - I'd love somehow to pinch somebody's mobile phone and take a picture of how they're behaving - how they're behaving to the nurses, what they're saying, how they look like. They're ugly. They're awful. They're not funny. And so the next morning or so they can look at it and say "Wow" and ask, "Is this what I really want to look like to myself. Is this what I want to look like to my kids, to my people who might be - I might be the role model, you know, sports people." That's the whole - I'd love it to happen. I reckon it'd be a great cure.

MICHAEL MCSHANE, LIQUOR INDUSTRY: Change for me and change for our industry is one where we have to actually talk about real cultural change. We have to actually be talking about young people. We have to make it uncool to get drunk. We actually have to actually embarrass people or change the culture with people that says, "You know what, that's no longer acceptable."

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Amanda Scott, chair of the NSW Youth Advisory Council believe young people shouldn't take all the blame for their behaviour; what about parental hypocrisy?

AMANDA SCOTT, YOUTH ADVISORY COUNCIL: I think one of the biggest factors with young people's consumption of alcohol is actually their parents' attitudes. I think that a lot of people's parents actually condone young people drinking. they encourage it, they buy lots of it. And if their young people come home drunk, heavily intoxicated, they don't seem to do anything about it. So I think that's a really, really big problem. And I also think it's socially acceptable to binge drink and to binge drink excessively. I know when we go out, there's a lot of young people and older people as well that always drink a lot and I think that's just socially acceptable and that's just something that people do.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Understandably perhaps, Sally Fielke, CEO of the Australian Hotels' Association, says liquor outlets are not entirely to blame.

SALLY FIELKE, AUSTRALIAN HOTELS ASSOC: In NSW alone, we have over 14,000 liquor licences of which just over 2,000 are pubs. So again, just honing in on the pubs is not your silver bullet here at all and I can't agree across the board with the panel more than to say education, personal responsibility and long term initiatives to generate cultural change. And a really good parallel I suppose is we did it with drink driving, but that has taken us a generation or more in order to get that message across. So, in terms of bright ideas, there's nothing that we're gonna fix in a political cycle. But we need to take a long term approach, I think, in terms of making it uncool to be drunk in a public place or drunk anywhere for that matter.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Like they once did to tobacco, Father Chris Riley, CEO of Youth Off the Streets, wants all governments to start to legislate to ban alcohol advertising and to disconnect alcohol from the promotion of sport.

CHRIS RILEY, YOUTH OFF THE STREETS: Well you watch the ads, for example, at 2 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon when the AFL football is on or the Grand Final is on; we have massive marketing. The alcohol industry is powerful, people are scared of it. They use that power and they are driving, I guess, their companies for the sake of the bottom dollar.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: So, there has to be a regulation of alcohol advertising?

CHRIS RILEY: Absolutely, and getting rid of products. I was actually calling for the removal of alcopops. They're targeting kids.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: According to an Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat 2008 audit, alcohol-related assaults have almost doubled over the last 10 years. The offence of glassing has entered the language. While public consciousness about the problem grows and less attitudes and binge drinking behaviour change, the police budget will have to grow.

So we have an alcohol problem, it seems. Isn't that the first thing any alcoholic must acknowledge before recovery can start?